One down...

I received an email yesterday, telling me I'd passed the RE course. (It was a pass or fail thing, but I'm still disappointed I didn't get a merit.) And now I've got an essay for the counselling course to be finished. I'm lucky that I've got a wonderful tutor for this one, who told me exactly where I lost points in my last piece of work. She is, it seems, a stickler for introductions. Not that I don't write them, she just wants 'proper' ones that say things like, 'This essay will consider...' and so on. In four years with the OU, it's the first time I've had to do that, and it feels very clunky. So I've written it (the intro, that is, had you expected more?) and am so embarrassed by it that I've come on here to recover and do some normal writing. Okay, so I've also done the hoovering and re-sorted the bookshelves - I just really, really don't feel like writing about existential therapy (or is it that I'm putting things off that cause anxiety? Maybe I should face this feeling of being hemmed in and decide where I want to go with my life? Maybe I should challenge my own assumptions about the world and how people view me? Maybe I should stop taking counselling courses.).

And I have books to read. The Bookworm (one of our former year 6 girls) bought me a present when she learnt it was my birthday next month. It was a second-hand book by Adriana Trigiani, which she said 'looked like my sort of thing'. It was - I already own it, but it's made me want to read the series it was from again, starting with Big Stone Gap. I'd forgotten how good the books are, so thank you, Bookworm, I'm very grateful. (And that reminds me, I have to buy the holiday book on Monday, when I go into town for Son Number Two's eye test.) 

Plus, the garden is looking nice in the sunshine. Well, that's not actually true. It looks awful, with weeds and a big pile of earth that's going to become part of a new lawn 'eventually', but there's a lot of wildlife, probably because of the weeds, etc. We have damsel flies chasing each other about, numerous butterflies, bumble bees, a kingfisher flitting down the stream, and frogs aplenty, much to the delight of the cats, who think these bouncy creatures are there just to amuse them. I have had to rescue a record number of frogs from the cats this year. I hadn't realised that frogs play dead when they're threatened. The first one looked all 'bleah' and floppy, so I carried it to the stream, whereupon it miraculously came to life and leapt of my hands into the water. After that heart attack, I'm now prepared.  

Sigh... It can't be put off any longer. I will drag myself over to Word and try to add to the 82 words I've already written. Actually, I've just read through them again. It looks completely wrong: how can an essay 'consider' anything? It's me that's doing the considering, but we're not allowed to write in the first person. Why didn't I take creative writing? I could have written any old rubbish for that...